Search engines that use link popularity to rank web sites tend to skew their results in favor of web sites that are more popular. Google™ uses an algorithm called PageRank™ that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents to measure its relative importance within the set. PageRank™ results from voting among all other web pages about how important a web page is. A hyperlink to a page counts as a vote of support. Similarly, a web page that is linked to by many pages with high PageRank™ receives a high rank itself. If there are no links to a web page, there is no support for that web page.
However, such ranking computation using the absolute number of inbound links produces a networking effect in that popular pages tend to become more popular because search engines that base all or part of their ranking on popularity allow for more popular web pages to be easier to find. Easier to find web pages are more likely to be visited more often and more likely to have new inbound links added to them. As such, these networking effects tend to obscure relevance by swampling relevance signals in the noise.